New Delhi: With a view to meeting the burgeoning demand of 50 crore skilled manpower by Electronics System Design Manufacturing (ESDM) sector by 2020, government needs to set up centres of excellence, an official said on Monday.

Addtional Secretary at Department of Information Technology and Administrator Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) N Ravi Shanker emphasised the urgent need of skill development in ESDM sector to meet the target of 500 million skilled manpower by the year 2020, set under National Skill Development Initiative, an official release said.

"DIT should set-up centres of excellence with focus on specific areas. ITIR and IIIT in different states may be identified to implement such scheme," Shanker said.

He also stressed upon the expectation from the Forum in providing inputs in form of a report covering all the aspects such as human resource and skill requirement, skill gaps, profile of human resource across various qualification and functional levels and others,the statement added.